It’s been pointed out to you before that snark at other commenters is not consistent with acceptance of our comments policy, GregM.

By the way, just a small fact-check, for gratis, it’s “weird”, not “wierd”. You must have been asleep in grade 3 when they taught you that.

Thanks for the link to Christina Ho’s article. Normally I try to stick with primary source articles when I am fact checking. Also my special focus was Greer’s mendacity and I just wanted to leave it there, as being a matter of record. However since you have drawn Christina Ho’s article to my attention I just think I might fact-check it as well. At the very least it should cause some laughs in her faculty commonroom.

That is to the eternal discredit of the perpetrators though it reflects nothing at all about Muslims generally for whom the rapes would have been grave sins and flagrant breaches of Islamic law and morals.

Exactly, yet they were portrayed by the mouthpieces for mouthpieces as Muslim boys with strong anti-Western sentiments who’d failed to assimilate with Australian society and very much supposed to be symptomatic of a particular brand of misogyny imported by the larger Australian Muslim ‘community’ (a word which became heavily loaded)

The K brothers employed every available ‘cultural defence’ and excuse but from my readings these were the ‘desperate’ resorts you find in almost any rape defence. The media would proceed to simultaneously dismiss these arguments (as you did above) and attempt to legitimise them as broader indicators – often from within the same article.

John Howard would respond with:

to integrate into Australian society Muslims need to speak English and ‘treat women equally’.

From the same article:

Popular expressions of outrage at gang rapes in Sydney highlighted not just that they were cases of violence against women, but, because the perpetrators were Muslim, they were almost crimes against Australia. From the beginning, the crimes were overwhelmingly represented as Lebanese or Muslim men raping non-Muslim women, making them a particularly un-Australian crime. As Alan Jones stated in 2001, ‘Lebanese Muslim gangs’ were ‘showering their contempt for Australia and our police on these young girls’ (reported on MediaWatch 2002).

Costello would harp about the death of ‘mushy multiculturalism’ in almost every speech he made.

Greer’s characterisation of “the deplorable cases of gang rapes of girls who happened to be Christians by boys who happened to be Muslim” is disingenuous in the extreme.

Why? It’s demonstrably accurate. Hundreds of newspaper articles/tv news and current affairs transcripts/radio talkback transcripts/political speeches and press releases attest to it. On the other hand, thankfully there were many in the media writing concurrently about the political and ‘media massaging’ of events.

I admire your fact checking ability but I’m certainly not convinced I could ever trust your interpretations of facts without some checking of my own (there’s at least one other highly contestable point you made in disagreement with Greer that’s not based on simply ‘getting something wrong’ – and not to avoid that Greer’s factual errors severely weakened her reasoning). Katz demonstrated earlier in this thread, your interpretations are commonly prone to fallibility.

For all the lengths you’ve gone to I still haven’t seen any evidence that led you to believe Greer engaged/engages in ‘malicious filth’.

Australia sent troops to Korea, to Vietnam and to the Gulf. Readiness to be involved in Asia might conceivably be explained as a rational response to the fiction that the wars there were being fought to defend Australia from communist imperialism. Why Australia was so keen to be involved in the Gulf War must remain a mystery.

The Prime Minister at the time, Bob Hawke, explained the reasons for Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War. Greer needs only read his explanation and the mystery will be solved for her. Since her research abilities are so inadequate that she is incapable of looking up his speeches in Hansard I provide the following link to his speech to the House of Representatives on 4 December 1990 setting out the reasons for Australia’s involvement in the war, to assist her, should by chance she come across this critique of her Bali opus.

http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/view_document.aspx?ID=102354&TABLE=HANSARDR

Australian involvement in that conflict meant very little to its allies, the actual contribution being minuscule because during the 1980s the Australian defence establishment had gradually and deliberately been reduced to next to nothing.
Perhaps the thinking was that if Australia lined up with the US in 1991, it could count on American support if ever it was needed, as it certainly would be in the event of aggression from without. Eagerness to be involved in the Gulf actually marked Australia as a conspicuous member of what was perceived as the pro-Israel axis.

Greer can’t resist having an anti-Israel dig. The Gulf War coalition included Saudi Arabia, Oman, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh, hardly noted for being part of any pro-Israel axis. Also given what Greer calls Australia’s minuscule contribution to the Gulf War it is hard to see how it could have been seen as a conspicuous member of the pro-Israel axis.

In East Timor, Australians came up against another unpleasant fact. America refused to help them with men or materiel in their peacekeeping commitments, and billions of dollars were drained from the public purse. The ultimate effect was probably what America would have desired.

In fact the Americans did provide men and materiel in assistance to the Australian led INTERFET forces. This from World Politics Review, (July 2008):

Under the command of Australian Maj. Gen. Peter Cosgrove, the first units of the newly christened International Force, East Timor (INTERFET) entered the territory on the morning of Sept. 20. The 2,500 soldiers spearheading the operation were overwhelmingly Australian. Besides the several hundred American military personnel eventually engaged in the initial phase of the intervention, the United States also contributed four C-130 Hercules transport planes, additional surveillance aircraft, and two warships.
The commitment of the amphibious ship, U.S.S. Belleau Wood, whose four CH-53 heavy-lift helicopters helped transport supplies to INTERFET, was especially important. Not only did it provide valuable transportation assistance, but it also served as a very visible symbol of the U.S. military commitment to INTERFET and Australia despite the force cap instituted by U.S. defense planners. The U.S. military enjoyed advanced interoperability with the Australia Defense Force in East Timor. Auspiciously, the U.S.S. Mobile Bay had already developed a degree of integration with the Australian military due to its recent participation in the bilateral Crocodile 99 exercises. [link]

One would have thought that anyone who has the slightest pretensions to academic credibility could at least get these facts right. The INTERFET intervention was not a secret operation after all.

Australia increased spending on defence, enough to have an impact on the Australian economy but not enough to make them important players in the international war game. Australia then volunteered men and materiel for the American-led operation in Afghanistan, where it is still involved.

It is strange that Greer bemoans Australia’s increased defence expenditure when earlier she had said that during the 1980s the Australian defence establishment had gradually and deliberately been reduced to next to nothing. However Australia’s increased expenditure on defence has had no significant impact on the Australian economy, which has been booming from 1996 to the present day

Perhaps the bombing of the Sari Club in Bali should not have come as such a surprise. Terrorism is not a substitute for war, but a preparative. The purpose of instilling terror is to force a polarisation of conflict by making neutrality an impossibility, so that armed confrontation becomes inevitable.
By mounting an attack that would be universally seen as vicious, cowardly and unprovoked, the perpetrators have forced a largely nonchalant Australia into the enemy camp. Australian defence spending will certainly increase, with little effect on Australia’s stature as an ally and policy maker but with crushing impact on the Australian people. Already, funding for essential social services has been cut and long-term welfare initiatives are being abandoned.

This is a bizarre statement (though just one of many) by Greer. Australia was already, at the time of the Bali bombing, in the enemy camp as far as the terrorists were concerned. It is hard to think of any country outside of Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea which had not already, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, aligned themselves with the United States and against the terrorists. Even Cuba lined up with the United States on this one.

The increase in defence expenditure has hardly had a crushing impact on the Australian people. The economy has continued to boom. Taxes have been slashed. The fiscal surplus continues to grow. Overall more money has been spent on social services than ever before

Meanwhile, tension between Muslims and non-Muslims in Australia is mounting, fuelled by media massaging of deplorable cases of gang-rapes of girls who happened to be Christian by boys who happened to be Muslim..

Greer’s characterisation of “the deplorable cases of gang rapes of girls who happened to be Christians by boys who happened to be Muslim” is disingenuous in the extreme. The evidence before the courts demonstrated abundantly that a motivating factor of the Muslim boys in raping the “Christian” girls was very fact that they were not Muslim and therefore fair game for sexual assault. That is to the eternal discredit of the perpetrators though it reflects nothing at all about Muslims generally for whom the rapes would have been grave sins and flagrant breaches of Islamic law and morals.

In allowing the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to be the first to identify the Bali bombers as al Qaeda, American intelligence has sent an ill-prepared Australia into the front line.

What??? American intelligence allowed Howard to identify the Bali bombers with Al Qaeda??? That is plain weird. It was well known well before the Bali bombing from Singaporean, Indonesian and Australian intelligence services that Jemaah Islamiyah was connected with Al Qaeda and that they were planning bombing operations against western targets in Indonesia. Howard was by no means the first to identify that and it had already been published in Australian newspapers before the Bali bombing.

I was in Indonesia before and at the time of the bombing and the Jakarta Post was reporting on the efforts of Western diplomats, our own included, to get the then president Megawati, to take the JI threat seriously before the bombing occurred.

No, the sheer breadth of my attack doesn’t devolve into pedantry. It exposes her as a systematic academic fraud who fabricates facts from which she then manufactures dishonest arguments. It is not an issue that she makes factual errors. It is that she is a liar. One post on a few errors might show that she is fallible as a researcher. Four posts (and the last one is below) demonstrate that this is her systematic modus operandi. Fabricate an untruth and then use it to construct for the gullible a false argument that can only be justified on the untruth that it is built upon.

You say that she is a polemicist. However as Katz has pointed out:

(But) a justifiable conclusion is never actually justified unless a logical and factually correct argument supports it.

A polemicist will respect an obligation to stay within the bounds of the truth and at least state facts correctly, even if selectively, whatever spin, emphasis and interpretation they put on them to pursue their argument. Greer does not. She just makes things up.

You also describe her as a pamphleteer. Why not cut to the chase and accept that she is a liar and recognise that makes her worthless as a participant in discourse. She offers no special insight as her acolytes wish of her. She offers no insight at all. She is just a cheap act, a sideshow alley character. A controversialist, as Geoff Honnor and Paulus have exposed.

Being not an anthropologist, nor a sociologist nor a historian nor a person holding any qualification in any relevant discipline she has no qualifications to speak with any authority on Aboriginal male rage, any more than she is qualified to speak on proctocology. Not that would stop from straying into that area (and she probably will) if she calculated that it would give her a few days of media sensation. This is her struggle for relevance and it’s sad that there are so many people who delude themselves that they are intelligent who accept her words so uncritically.

On your final smug point with its emphasis on the we when you say “it would be nice if we didn’t take the pamphleteer’s licence with the truth. Surely you’d agree.

You’ve fact-checked my posts then? Care to point out where there is an error of fact in them? If you want to uncritically buy her lies that’s up to you. You can confidently expect however that, in the spirit of free speech, that I will be quite happy to point out the errors in your thinking. You have along way to go in developing the faculty of independent thought.

As promised my last post on Greer’s Bali article will appear next.

Indeed, Kim.
My bet is that his best debates are held firmly in his own personal space.